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MIDI in ProVideoPlayer 2: Tutorial

If you haven’t already, please read my previous post on what the heck I am talking about. If you’ve already read it, then what I am about to share will make a whole lot more sense.
So, I discovered that MIDI won’t work the way I wanted to do it in PVP2, because of the Control Changes being different than Note On/Off. So, I had to find a way to remap MIDI. Luckily, someone on the forum introduced me to MIDIPipe, and with a ton of help from my friend Jeff the aerospace engineer/musician, we were able to figure it out.
I first used a program called MIDI monitor to see what my computer was seeing. MIDI monitor does exactly what is says: it tells you what key is being pressed, what channel it’s in, it’s velocity, everything. You can filter out unwanted data, too. This allowed me to not only see if my new Korg nanoKontrol2 worked, but what the third “M” button actually did!

From there, we opened MIDIPipe and through trial and error tried to make a Control Change become a Note. We finally found the right combination with this little recipe:

MIDI In

Korg nanoKontrol2

Message Factory

Trigger

Type: Control Change

ID: 000

Value: checked (0-127)

Message

1: Status Byte

Value: 0x90=144 Note On – Channel 1

2: Data Byte

Value: 0x00= 0

3: Variable Byte

Use last value from CC#: 000 B

on channel: 1

MIDI Out

MIDIPipe Output 1

Now, I know this looks ridiculous, but what we essentially did was take MIDI In from the Korg, if the value is 0 (the first slider), take that information (where the slider is) and map it to the 0 key (which is Middle C or C-2 according to PVP2). Now, I just had create a new pipe for the other 50-some keys on the controller (yea – it took a little while). I did everything here 1-to-1, meaning I tried to map every Control Change to the Note of the same value (CC0 to Note 0, CC1 to Note 1, etc…). That way I wouldn’t have to do so much head conversion later on.

In PVP then, I created a new MIDI controller, but selected the MIDIPipe Output 1 instead of the Korg nanoKontrol2. Then I simply picked the slider I wanted to adjust and picked what I want it to do, and started plugging in numbers. I set everything I was sure that I wasn’t going to use to “100” because its easy and the controller I have only goes to the 70’s.

Now, for the things in “Select by index” section in PVPs MIDI prefereces that I wanted to use, I had to alter the triggers in MIDIPipe. I wanted trigger cues 1-8 to be mapped to the top 8 buttons on the controller. While the controller sees them as different MIDI controls all together, PVP is looking for them to be the same note with different velocities. So, for this, I mapped CC32 thru CC39 (those 8 buttons) ALL to be Note 32. At this point my computer saw all 8 buttons as the same key being pushed. Then I added a “Set” to the pipe and set the velocity to the cue number (1-8) that I wanted it to trigger.

One note about these as well: These cue in a specific order. For instance, the Trigger Cues trigger the cues in the order of the current selected playlist. So, MIDI Note 32, Velocity 6 will select the 6th clip in the current playlist. Likewise, Enable/Disable Effects will toggle effects in the order of the Workspace list, which can change. so what out for that. Here is my list:

You can download my MIDIPipe here, but it will only really work if you have a nanoKontrol2 and want things mapped the same way that I have them mapped See that here. But you can take it apart and see how it works and use the same concepts in your own mapping adventures!